[HCoop-Discuss] VPS hosting for HCoop

[Philip Neustrom]

An important question is whether Hcoop wishes to own hardware
infrastructure.  Ownership of resources is important, especially at large
scales.

If we were to go the VPS route -- largely for the simplified managment -- I
would recommend we purchase our VPS from a cooperative provider such as
Cernio.  Despite the slightly higher cost, our members payments would go
toward supporting a similarly-aligned effort and we would have some say in
how the VPS organization was run.

I hope that some day our internet transit, power, colocation space and
software-level organizations are all democratically run and accountable.

--philip

On May 17, 2009 7:00 AM, "Adam Chlipala" <adamc at hcoop.net> wrote:

This discussion seems to have sputtered out.  Personally, I'm thinking
of 100% VPS hosting (probably spread among multiple providers to some
extent) as the best option for HCoop going forward.  Rob Gubler
mentioned some file system/IO failures he's experienced with
virtualization.  Shaun Empie said he doesn't think moving to 100% VPS is
a good idea, but he didn't give any reasons, and he hasn't responded yet
to a query about what they are.  Nathan Kennedy has been saying for a
while that we should own our own servers.  Besides that, I think we've
only seen positive opinions about the VPS option.

Here's my summary of the relevant issues, in decreasing order of importance:

VPS Pros:
- Virtual servers can be accessed from anywhere, as long as they're in
good enough shape to be accessible via console.  We can always at least
reboot them remotely for free.  This means that we lose _all_ geographic
constraints on where admins need to be to handle any possible failure.
Thus, we can have 100% time coverage for emergency response, without
needing to find anyone willing to work the admin graveyard shift, since
we can spread admins across time zones.  Also, even if our servers live
in a relatively high cost-of-living area which has good 'net
connectivity, we can still hire admins anywhere in the world.
- We don't have to purchase, diagnose, or replace hardware.  The VPS
provider will do that for us.  We just need to be ready to move
functionality from broken nodes reasonably quickly, probably using the
provider's control panel interface.
- We can add new machines with a few control panel clicks, in response
to load increases or anything else.
- For underutilized virtual machines, we probably save at least a little
bit of money compared to dedicated servers or colocation of HCoop-owned
servers.

VPS Cons:
- Crazy stuff might happen with simulated hardware.  I don't know how
likely it is that we'd experience anything like this with one of the
major providers, though, since they spend a lot of time tweaking kernels
to avoid such trouble.
- We wouldn't own the machines.  (Is this really a problem?  Maybe it's
just old-fashioned to think of owning machines instead of data.)
- We would be sharing machines with other customers, which could lead to
not enough computational resources being available for us, in periods of
high load.
- We would be sharing machines, so new potential security problems
emerge.  (Interesting note on this and the last point: Linode apparently
has an unlisted VPS kind big enough that it actually takes up its own
8-core machine, for $800/mo..)

Did I miss anything?

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